It’s fair to say that any sales person who masters the art of overcoming a recalcitrant prospect’s sales barriers should be considered well on their way to total sales mastery. Turning a firm No into a Yes takes a much higher level of skill than turning curiosity, wariness, or apathy into a Yes. The tactics in play may look the same, but you need trumps up your sleeve to shatter through the sales barriers and make contact with your typical sales process. In this article, we’ll be covering three potential tactics for making your pitch punch right through any sales barriers that dare stand in your way.

Research, Research, Research

To break down sales barriers, you need to know your enemy. In this case, there are several ‘enemies’ you need to know: The prospect, the competition (especially if the prospect’s sales barriers are up because they’re satisfied with a competitor), the industry, and perhaps most importantly the flaws and common complaints in and around your company and product.

Researching all of these things until you know them better than the prospect should be considered the basic first step for overcoming sales barriers. Even if you want to utilize other moves to get through to the prospect, you want to start here and build upon a firm foundation of information. Skipping ahead to other tactics will only bring you down.

Build Relationships First, Sales Second

Sales barriers don’t impact your efforts nearly as much when you emphasize relationship building over the hard sale. In this case it’s less about punching through the sales barriers a prospect might have erected and more about slipping past them unnoticed. With this tactic, you’re selling yourself first, your product second. People will buy from you over their hesitation if they like you and want to work with you in the future. The important thing for this is, of course, to be someone who can genuinely engage with prospects as people and not numbers. If the delicate touch is beyond you, you’ll just come across as a sleazy legal cousin to the common con artist.

It’s worth pointing out that there are myriad benefits to utilizing a relationship-focuses sales process with all of your prospects. You build a rapport that will carry the customer through the buyer’s remorse phase safely, encourage them to stick with you the next time they need to buy, and can even help you establish a base of clients that won’t leave you even on those occasions where the competition has a superior product on the market. Consider making this your default approach instead of an emergency tool-you won’t regret it.

Be Bold, Be Aggressive; You Have Nothing to Lose

When all else fails, and delicate approaches don’t work, the brazen approach sometimes works as a sales barriers nuke. That means calling a client and telling them in concrete, blunt terms exactly what you’ve got that the competition doesn’t exactly what they’re giving up by passing you by, exactly why they’ll feel like an idiot months down the line when they’re missing out on everything you have to offer. 

To really pull this off, you need experience or talent in spades and a product you can throw your weight behind without shame or hedging. If there are complaints in the wild that the prospect might throw in your face, you need to be ready and able to not just brush them aside or sidestep them, but crush them completely. This is an approach that’s about overwhelming sales barriers with sheer cheek and confidence. People love buying from a confident person that can tell them in no uncertain terms exactly what they’re getting. Just make sure your product can hold up to what you’re saying and that you can say what needs saying with that necessary level of unchecked confidence.